In the 1920s, the area in and around Montparnasse, on Paris's Left Bank, was a hive of artistic activity. At home in the Rue de Fleurus, the writer Gertrude Stein was running a salon attended by Henri Matisse and Guillaume Apollinaire, which she would later immortalise in the 'autobiography' of her lover, Alice B Toklas. The young Ernest Hemingway was another of her guests, and, when he wasn't idolising Stein, arguing with her, or obsessing over his nascent prose style, he was mixing with the incestuous group of friends who would inspire his own early masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises. Dadaism was drifting into Surrealism, Man Ray was honing his photographic eye, and Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the independent bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was risking her savings to publish the latest work of a slim, bespectacled Irishman. The move would almost bankrupt her, but was probably worth it. James Joyce's Ulysses did, after all, prove something of a critical success.

It was a time of great art and great characters, and, come the evening, they would throng at Le Jockey Bar, where a woman with a perfectly-placed beauty spot rasped bawdy, comic songs. This woman, an artist's model and cabaret singer, was wont to climb on the tables, lifting her skirts to show her garters, and, often, a whole lot more. (Kiki never bothered with anything so bourgeois as underwear.) For her audience, she was much more than just another entertainer. Over time, Kiki of Montparnasse became a friend to many, an inspiration to some, and - through most of the era - Man Ray's lover and muse.

Reading memoirs of "the Quarter" while researching a novel, I kept encountering the same colourful characters. At the centre of it all was Kiki - a wild, impetuous, amoral woman at a time when, beyond bohemian circles, women were often still expected to be seen and not heard. "All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red," Kiki once said. "And I will always find somebody to offer me that." The more I read about her, the more I fell for her - and I just had to turn her into a character in my novel.

Born in Burgundy, Kiki made a characteristically dramatic entrance: her unmarried mother went into labour so suddenly that Kiki was delivered in the street. Soon afterwards, her mother went to Paris, and little Alice Prin - as she then was - was left in the care of her grandmother. On occasion, money would arrive from Paris, but Alice would often have to do chores for neighbours in return for food, or even steal vegetables from neighbouring gardens.

At the age of 12, Alice went to live with her mother in Paris. She soon decided she had had enough of school, and landed her first job, working for a printer. This sounds innocuous enough, except that the young teenager was binding copies of the Kama Sutra. Soon after, she became a bakery's maid-of-all-work, where, according to her memoir, the baker "used to strip naked and make dirty jokes for my benefit."

Aged 14, she had a fight with the baker's wife - "I jumped on her and gave her a good beating" - and started modelling nude for an elderly sculptor. This led to a final rift with her mother, who stamped up to the studio and called her a whore. Alice took to the streets, often sleeping in barns behind the Gare Montparnasse. She was forced to wash in the Montparnasse cafes, and it was there that she met the artists who reinvented her.

Alice began posing for the expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, who christened her "Kiki". Though she lacked the fashionable ethereal look of the period, Kiki didn't care: she revelled in her sturdy, big-featured sensuality. She quickly became a popular model, and was painted, sculpted and photographed by artists including Pascin, Derain and Óscar Dominguez. Moise Kisling's painting Jeune Femme au Decollette (1922) shows a graceful Kiki looking up with huge, moist eyes, while Per Krogh's Kiki Nude (1928) has a raw, fleshy sexuality. But the most memorable image is Man Ray's photograph Le Violon D'Ingres, which shows a naked Kiki, seated and viewed from behind, with two 'f's in her back; a celebration of her violin-curves, and a statement that she was, in effect, an instrument for the creation of art.

Kiki and Man Ray were lovers for six years, during which time he made hundreds of images of her, and was hugely influential in the creation of her persona. Kay Boyle, a Paris-based American novelist and contemporary of Kiki's, wrote that, "Man Ray had designed Kiki's face for her ... and painted it on with his own hand. He would begin by shaving her eyebrows off ... and then putting other eyebrows back, in any colour he might have selected for her mask that day ... Her heavy eyelids might be done in copper one day and in royal blue another, or else in silver or jade."

Despite their intense connection, Kiki ultimately went too far for Man Ray. When a cafe-owner in Nice called her a whore, she got into a fight, and was thrown into jail: Man Ray's lawyer could only secure her release by producing a doctor's certificate stating that she had a nervous disorder. Soon afterwards, Man Ray left Kiki for his photographic protege, Lee Miller. He broke the news to Kiki at one of their regular cafe haunts, and was forced to duck under a table while she hurled plates at his head.

By the late 1920s, Kiki had her own cabaret, Chez Kiki, and a table at Le Dome was permanently reserved for her. She had also begun painting primitive, narrative scenes, and, in 1927, had a sell-out exhibition. Two years later, she published her memoir, The Education of a French Model, which was banned in America on the grounds of obscenity. Really, though, Kiki was most famous simply for being famous. Gossip swilled around her, and, even when the stories were apocryphal, Kiki revelled in them. There was the story that she had no pubic hair, for instance - that she had never grown any, or that she could only grow it when in love, or that she shaved it off and chalked it on again when posing for artists. Some women, however bohemian, might have found such speculation upsetting. Kiki didn't.

Her reign ended along with the decade. She seemed unable to function outside Paris - an attempt to break into the American film industry of the 1930s failed - but Paris was no longer hers. In her last years, Kiki slipped into self-parody, singing for tourists in the Montparnasse cafes, to fund her voracious cocaine and alcohol habits. In 1953, at the age of 52, she collapsed and died. Her funeral was paid for by the cafe-owners of the 6th arrondissement.

Kiki "dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era," wrote Hemingway in his preface to Kiki's 1929 memoirs. Their publication, he said, marked the definitive end of the Montparnasse period.

The same year that she published those memoirs, Kiki painted a girl walking a tightrope, balancing precariously above a street fair. The crowd are either marvelling at her act or looking straight up her skirt. There is no safety net to speak of.

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